Before you can start building your home on the web, you need an address for it. Most of the site builders here can register a unique domain for you, and all can give you a web address using the provider's domain, for example, yourname.sitebuilder.com. The services also let you use a domain you've acquired from a third-party registrar such as pairNIC, but you usually must pay the site builder for that privilege.

GoCentral Website Builder can act as your hub, the place where your friends and contacts can see your posts, photos, videos and more. With the option to link to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+ on your website, your visitors can be everywhere you are on the web. Being able to cover multiple platforms gives you the opportunity to reach more people, while creating appropriate content for each of your socials (like posting all of your photos on Instagram, and tweeting about your most recent business venture on Twitter). By centrally locating all the links in one place – your new website – you are giving your website visitors a seamless experience. Linking to your social media in your website gives you an advantage in communicating with your visitors; the more they can connect with you and do so in the forum that’s most comfortable to them, the more they’ll engage with your site, and thus you or your business.
Absolutely. You have the option to customize your website based on your business needs. You can add site content wherever you’d like in a variety of sections; from multiple site pages, to scrollable sections that you can add to each of those pages, to a gallery of images, menus and price lists, and YouTube or Vimeo videos. Each section in your website is customizable as well, from the name of the page, to your website’s navigation bar. You’ll also have the ability to change text colors, styles and font. It’s important to have a mobile and desktop-friendly website. With Website Builder you’ll be able to choose tablet and desktop layouts to give your visitors the experience you want them to have.

I am currently looking at setting up a blog for the area I specialise in. I am aware of wordpress.org but have been a bit daunted by the number of webhosts out there offering this and that. One particular issue is that I use macs and I was wondering whether bluehost is compatible with the mac, and whether there are any other extra steps I have to take when using a mac over windows. Would it be as simple as registering with a webhost then clicking one-step installation on a mac?

You've got the site, now you need some visitors. How are they going to find you? Search engines, naturally — and where your site ranks can have a huge impact on your business. GoCentral Website Builder helps improve your rank on Google, Yahoo and Bing by automatically reviewing your site and adding relevant, high-value keywords and phrases. And a higher rank means more visitors.
Do you want to include a blog? This will be helpful for search engine optimization (SEO) — more on that in a minute — encourage engagement and community, and establish you as an expert. If the blog is the cornerstone of your site, take some time to outline (or, for overachievers, write) your first few posts and plan some topics you might write about over the next year.
For those who prefer to use a commercial program, thesitewizard.com has numerous online tutorials for a web editor called Dreamweaver, a program with features on par with that of Expression Web. The Dreamweaver Tutorial takes you through all the steps needed to design a complete website, in addition to providing you with the theoretical and practical foundations that will help you create and maintain that site.

Hey Theo, Generally speaking, Weebly is a solid website building platform. You don't need how to code, their probably one of the most user-friendly web builders, and their support is good. Best way to decide is to sign up for a free account and start testing their tools. You're not obligated to subscribe to a premium paid plan at all. You can upgrade whenever you want to, and only if you find them being to provide the tools and services that you need. Jeremy

Hi Jeremy! Thank you so much for posting this! I found this to be very helpful!! So I do have a few questions though... First off, I am wanting to build a website that advertises a service I offer, displays images in two separate galleries, can be involved with a separate calander that can be accessed from my phone and be up to date on available times to schedule an appointment, and, most importantly, can have a payment option to prepay for my service to secure a time slot with a possible escrow type function to be able to add payments onto the set appointments. Does this make any sense? If it does, does this sound possible? Which website builder would you recommend to have access to these functions? I am just starting out so cost is also a factor, although I am willing to pay a reasonable amount of money to get this set up and to maintain it. Thank you in advance!!

GoCentral Website Builder lets you quickly build a customized site and get it out there for the world to see. It’s all done through components that we call sections. What're those? They're features that you can slide into your website to provide added functionality instead of being limited by a template. Just pick an industry or interest, and we drop you into a customizable design.

This brings us to the topic of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Now, I’m going to be honest – SEO can be a complex business. After all, we’re talking about trying to make our websites look good to a mindbogglingly complicated algorithm, which has details that Google keeps closely guarded. Oh, and of course, millions upon millions of other sites are trying to do the same thing.

Establishing a business plan and marketing strategy may be a lot of hard and daunting work in the beginning, both will guide you in setting up your website. Because this is an increasingly popular, and growing, field, there are more than enough online marketing strategies to help you. You can review these strategies to help determine what does and doesn’t work. Just keep in mind that there may be some areas, such as SEO and PPC, that may require outside help.

The best place to find themes is through WordPress’s own Theme Directory. Search for the types of themes you’d be interested in. If you’re setting up a newspaper search ‘newspaper’, if you need a site for your café search ‘cafe’. There’ll be dozens, if not hundreds, of contenders. Clicking on a theme takes you to its own page where you can see user reviews and preview the theme in action.

If you've got a business that takes appointments, then GoCentral’s built-in Online Appointments feature is tailor-made for you. It lets your customers set and make appointments for your services, keeping you free to do the work. And it comes with all sorts of goodies including text and email notifications, online payments and client management tools. You get all this and more with our Business Plus and Online Store plans.

Responsive design is a popular web design strategy used by some of these site builders. This approach reformats the same webpage content to fit different screens. But in terms of SEO (search engine optimization), the search engines only care about whether a site displays suitably on mobile screen sizes. Both Bing and Google have pages where you can enter your URL to see if your site plays on mobile acceptably.
Client side means what goes on in the user’s browser. JavaScript is perhaps the next thing to try adding to your website and it’s where the actual programming begins. Up until now it’s just been writing tags (HTML) and rules (CSS). Javascript will allow your site to react to user actions, rearrange elements on the fly and even add new HTML tags where there weren’t any before. There are many frameworks for Javascript which will save you time and will often do things far more efficiently than you could yourself. JQuery is by far the most popular.
A good SEO strategy will organically move you to the top of the search results. With Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, you’ll take matters more into your own hands by paying to land atop the searches. The best part? You only have to pay for premium placement if someone clicks on your link. You choose the keywords you want to bring up your ad, and you can set and limit your own budget.
Like many companies, you may choose to utilize the services of an experienced web designer to create your site. Be prepared to answer pertinent questions as these answers are necessary to produce a “creative brief.” The creative brief will serve as a guide or reference to creating the site. Regardless of whether you use a design firm or not, you should know the answers to the following questions:
Hi Jeremy I have a desire to make an easy solution for my users who can make their own website / theme for wordpress. A plugin that allows my users, through frontend on my site, to choose between menu, (text / grib layout - blog styles, magazin) photo slide, footer, etc. - so they can make there style theme Do you know if there is a plugin that can this? (So I upload the different layouts examples that they can choose from)?

Use 99Designs.com: 99Designs.com runs contests where multiple designers compete for your logo and other design business. This is a great option because you get to see many different professional and creative designs (It’s how we found our logo at Fit Small Business!), yet only pay for the one you wind up choosing. The price on 99designs ranges from $299 to $799 depending on how many designers you want competing and the quality of those designers.

With all that being said, I want to share some things you can do to improve your website’s SEO. To keep things simple, we’ll take an 80/20 approach here – as in 80% of the results come from 20% of the efforts. Yes, there are lots of tiny little tweaks you can make to marginally improve SEO – and if you’re curious about them, you might want to check out this set of tutorials.
Of course, another great way to learn web development is to simply look at code. If you’re using Google Chrome, you can hit CTRL+U (or if you’re on a Mac, just go to View -> Developer -> Source) to see the HTML for the page you’re on. You can also use the Web Developer extension to dig in even deeper. This method won’t work for viewing server-side code like PHP, but it’s great for digging into HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
But testing gets complicated because some browsers only run on certain operating systems. Apple Safari runs on iOS and Mac OS, while Internet Explorer runs only on Windows. It's best to take advantage of services like Browsershots or Browserstack. Browsershots furnishes screenshots of your website as it will look in various browsers. Browserstack actually gives you full remote access to virtual machines so you can test your site in the most common environments. Alternatively, you can set up your own virtual machine, but that takes some expertise. (If you're going that route, Microsoft has some tools for developers including a ready-to-use virtual machine at modern.ie.)
Once you get a handle on HTML and CSS, you can make what is called a static website. It’s simply one .HTML file represents one page on your site. Static sites are relatively the fastest to load and typically allows designers the most freedom without compromises that have to be made due to limitations of many CMS/Frameworks. (Wordpress in particular is infamous for this, although it has improved).
When your website is ready for public viewing, you'll have to upload your webpages to your web server. You can buy space on a server from various providers (see How much does it cost to do something on the web?). Once you settle on which provider to use, the provider will email you the access information, usually in the form of an SFTP URL, username, password, and other information needed to connect to their server. Bear in mind that (S)FTP is now somewhat old-fashioned, and other uploading systems are starting to become popular, such as RSync and Git/GitHub.
Absolutely. You have the option to customize your website based on your business needs. You can add site content wherever you’d like in a variety of sections; from multiple site pages, to scrollable sections that you can add to each of those pages, to a gallery of images, menus and price lists, and YouTube or Vimeo videos. Each section in your website is customizable as well, from the name of the page, to your website’s navigation bar. You’ll also have the ability to change text colors, styles and font. It’s important to have a mobile and desktop-friendly website. With Website Builder you’ll be able to choose tablet and desktop layouts to give your visitors the experience you want them to have.
Hey, Jeremy, thanks for an informative article. I'm planing to start my own blog but choosing the right hosting provider gets me a bit confused... I'm still a beginner at this, so would prefer something that would offer a free plan, at least for testing purposes. A (very!) user friendly interface is obviously a must... Could you please share some hosting companies that match my requests or at least point me in the right direction where to find them? Many thanks.
For years Adobe Dreamweaver has been synonymous with web page creation. It's gone from being a creator of HTML pages in a WYSIWYG interface to being able to handle programming pages in Cold Fusion, JavaScript, PHP, and other formats. Its liquid layout lets you see how pages look at different browser and screen sizes—even on smartphones and tablets. It's about as code-heavy as you want it to be.
Once you get a handle on HTML and CSS, you can make what is called a static website. It’s simply one .HTML file represents one page on your site. Static sites are relatively the fastest to load and typically allows designers the most freedom without compromises that have to be made due to limitations of many CMS/Frameworks. (Wordpress in particular is infamous for this, although it has improved).
I am using wix for building my e-commerce site in India, but after spending so much time building it i realized that it doesn't support Indian Rupee. So i am just stuck at this and don't know what else to do. My question is that, is there any other payment option that can be added to my site so that my customers can choose different payment options ( even if that means a third party payment gateway).??
Thanks so much for this awesome article :) I had literally no experience in building a website when I started using Weebly and I was surprised at how easy it was to make! I'm interested in looking into other platforms now that I'm up and running, particularly Wordpress? But I'll probably be sticking with Weebly for a long time until I'm ready, it really was super easy to use. Thanks again :)